Games literacy and gaming capital : a theoretical and practical examination

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine the notion of video game literacy and gaming capital from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The study outlines a series of concepts to refine the ideas of gaming literacy, gaming capital, and how they interconnect, comparing those notions of literacy with learning to read and write traditional text. Concepts from the field of cognitive sciences are introduced to further discuss the idea of how people learn through action, how that action allows them to make more informed judgments in the future, and how digital games in particular enable players to learn as they play. A practical experiment is then engineered based on this research to test these concepts in practice, by observing test subjects of varying skill levels playing Super Mario Bros., and judging their ability to learn as they play in order to observe their personal capacity for games literacy, and observing the practical differences between games-literate players and non-literate players.